Whole: The Word I Found in the Middle of Nowhere

I went quiet for a while.

For about two weeks I did not post, did not check anything, and did not let work follow me. I wanted to belong to myself, even if very few people were waiting to hear from me.

I started HERRITE because I believe words carry weight. I also know how quickly that weight fades. We read a line, it lands, we agree with it. Weeks later the old heaviness returns, as though nothing had been read at all. Words have to be returned to. So, one word and one story, to be shared or kept.

This one comes from Tanzania.

Much of the journey was spent in conversation with our guide. An unfamiliar country is easiest to enter through the person sitting beside you. I brought him the assumptions I had arrived with, some of which I had not known I held, and he answered each of them with patience. He loves his country, and it was plain to see. He spoke just as plainly about the things that love cannot change. I left with fewer certainties and a wider view.

At midday the savanna falls still. The heat is too great for most animals, and the Land Cruiser moves on toward a horizon that never draws nearer.

At first I searched the grass, waiting for something to appear. A lion, perhaps. Something to make the trip count.

Nothing came.

Somewhere in that waiting I realised I was not disappointed. Wind moved through the open roof. A single acacia stood alone in all that space and needed nothing around it to be worth looking at. Even the rough tracks, known to travellers as the “African massage”, felt like a fair price for such freedom.

I had been looking at the plains as though something were missing. Nothing was. They were whole, and I had simply never learned to look at anything that way.

Watching the animals, I understood the law of the jungle: no one stands outside it. Not the lion, not the gazelle, not those of us watching from the car. It waits for us at home too, in offices and inboxes and all the long waiting.

Perhaps I had the order backwards. I had always assumed that feeling complete had to be earned first, and that enjoying life came after. Out there I had earned nothing, and it was still enough.

Nothing missing. Never was.